over one another like a little coffee-mill, and says to her “Oo impdent to mi Gran, me tut oor hi!” “O!” says Miss Wozenham looking down scornfully at the Mite “this is not a street-child is it not!  Really!” I bursts out laughing and I says “Miss Wozenham if this ain’t a pretty sight to you I don’t envy your feelings and I wish you good-day.  Jemmy come along with Gran.”  And I was still in the best of humours though his cap came flying up into the street as if it had been just turned on out of the water-plug, and I went home laughing all the way, all owing to that dear boy.

The miles and miles that me and the Major have travelled with Jemmy in the dusk between the lights are not to be calculated, Jemmy driving on the coach-box which is the Major’s brass-bound writing desk on the table, me inside in the easy-chair and the Major Guard up behind with a brown-paper horn doing it really wonderful.  I do assure you my dear that sometimes when I have taken a few winks in my place inside the coach and have come half awake by the flashing light of the fire and have heard that precious pet driving and the Major blowing up behind to have the change of horses ready when we got to the Inn, I have half believed we were on the old North Road that my poor Lirriper knew so well.  Then to see that child and the Major both wrapped up getting down to warm their feet and going stamping about and having glasses of ale out of the paper matchboxes on the chimney-piece is to see the Major enjoying it fully as much as the child I am very sure, and it’s equal to any play when Coachee opens the coach-door to look in at me inside and say “Wery ’past that ’tage.—­’Prightened old lady?”

But what my inexpressible feelings were when we lost that child can only be compared to the Major’s which were not a shade better, through his straying out at five years old and eleven o’clock in the forenoon and never heard of by word or sign or deed till half-past nine at night, when the Major had gone to the Editor of the Times newspaper to put in an advertisement, which came out next day four-and-twenty hours after he was found, and which I mean always carefully to keep in my lavender drawer as the first printed account of him.  The more the day got on, the more I got distracted and the Major too and both of us made worse by the composed ways of the police though very civil and obliging and what I must call their obstinacy in not entertaining the idea that he was stolen.  “We mostly find Mum” says the sergeant who came round to comfort me, which he didn’t at all and he had been one of the private constables in Caroline’s time to which he referred in his opening words when he said “Don’t give way to uneasiness in your mind Mum, it’ll all come as right as my nose did when I got the same barked by that young woman in your second floor”—­says this sergeant “we mostly find Mum as people ain’t over-anxious to have what I may call second-hand children. You’ll get him back Mum.”